I read a tweet last week which simply said: 24,582 words translated in 4 days. Burned-out brain but hands still in good shape. Thank you #memoQ and #DragonNaturallySpeaking!
I had this vision of translators who use voice recognition software like Dragon Naturally Speaking as doing things in an easier and more relaxing way but clearly I have got this completely wrong. When someone translates 6000 words in one day they are working pretty hard.
Last year at memoQfest we had Dr Jim Wardell talk about how he uses Dragon and memoQ for his translation work. When Jim started translating in the 1970s he used to dictate his translation and a secretary would type it. I believe he looked at speech recognition software early on but it was not until 2005 that he started using it. The software had improved greatly by this stage. You can see a video on the Kilgray website of Jim using Dragon NaturallySpeaking with memoQ. This video is from November 2010 but today I saw a tweet mentioning it.
I’ve been trying to write this blog entry with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and have been having much less success than Jim. When I mention Kilgray Dragon wrote “cool grey”. I made some other interesting mistakes. I guess I have to practice.
Peter Reynolds
memoQ co-CEO
